Liberals' Inequality Pitch Falls Flat

From WSJ's Kimberley Strassel:

With his disapproval ratings at record highs, his health law flailing, President Obama decided 2014 would be the year for a new agenda. "Inequality has deepened," he warned in the State of the Union. "Upward mobility has stalled." He laid out a roster of populist proposals: more unemployment insurance, raising the federal minimum wage, giving women "equal pay for equal work." The White House and congressional Democrats have since spent every waking minute holding rallies, issuing reports, tweeting and giving interviews on all those issues.

The political calculus is that vulnerable Republicans can be bludgeoned into joining Democrats to support poll-tested and popular pocketbook issues—thereby changing the political subject and rallying the Democratic base. ...

It isn't working this time—at least not yet. The Republican response to date has been a united and calm refusal to fold.

NRA Wins Again

From Conor Friedersdorf, the Atlantic:

After the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, many in the American media insisted that the tragedy should prompt a "conversation about gun control." These articles were written as if there had never been such a conversation. In fact, the issue had been debated for decades. Given the results, I argued, there was no reason to presume that a new conversation would end in more gun control.

That conversation has now come and gone. The result?

"Perverse as it may sound, the horrific mass shooting in December 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary produced a burst of state-level gun control bills around the country and then triggered a much stronger pro-gun backlash," Paul M. Barrett reports at Businessweek. "The counter-reaction has now reached its apogee in Georgia. In the past year alone, 21 states have enacted laws expanding gun rights, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Several states added piecemeal provisions allowing firearms on college campuses or in bars or churches. Georgia’s politicians, egged on by the National Rifle Association, have gone for broke."

He goes on to offer advice to gun-control advocates:

The smart response is not scorn or exaggeration.

For better or worse, gun ownership has come to symbolize a range of deeply felt ideas about culture and government authority. Making fun of people who view their firearms as emblems of liberty and traditional values (however they define those values) will neither change minds nor repeal legislation.

Koch-Funded Ads Bearing Fruit

In a lengthy piece at National Review Online, Eliana Johnson delves into the years-long "sustained assault against Obamacare mounted with the help of the donor network organized by Charles and David Koch and the array of social welfare groups it funds."

Johnson reports that the Koch-funded ads "represent five years of knowledge, accumulated through polls and focus groups, about how to use the health care issue" effectively to shift public opinion.

Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, unlimited outside spending by 501(c)(4) social-welfare groups has finally allowed Republicans to match the political muscle of labor unions, whose spending was also blown open by the decision, but which have long poured money into Democratic coffers.

That newfound equity is one reason why the AFP ads have sent Democrats into a tailspin and led them to make the ads, and two of the people funding them, a major campaign issue of 2014. Senate majority leader Harry Reid devoted much of a news conference and an entire speech on the Senate floor to attacking the Koch brothers, calling their efforts “un-American” and accusing them of trying to rig the political system in their favor. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has launched a digital campaign around the rallying cry “The GOP is addicted to Koch!”

The effort came about when conservative and libertarian donors surveyed the landscape and realized that the only groups standing in opposition to nationalized health care were 501(c)(3)s, which were prohibited from participating in campaign-related activity. "There weren't any groups operating in the [501](c)(4) space devoted to putting the brakes on a national health care bill."

The Koch network’s anti-Obamacare assault began in 2009 with Sean Noble, a former chief of staff to Arizona congressman John Shadegg and then an adviser to the Koch brothers, and Randy Kendrick, the wife of Arizona Diamondbacks part-owner Ken Kendrick and a prominent donor to the Kochs’ formidable fundraising network....

The result of Kendrick and Noble’s efforts was the Center to Protect Patient Rights (CPPR), which was incorporated in April 2009 and funded largely through donations from the Koch network. The two attended a June 2009 Koch donor seminar in Aspen, Colo., where, Noble says, a federal takeover of health care was for the first time introduced to donors as an issue of urgent importance.

Before lunch on the third and final day of the seminar, Noble says, Kendrick delivered an “impassioned speech” on the topic. “People were moved to tears by how invested she was in this,” Noble says, and at the lunch that followed her remarks, donors spontaneously pledged $13 million to the cause. Since then, similar lunches have raised over $100 million.

Read the rest of Johnson's remarkable story,  Inside the Koch-Funded Ads Giving Dems Fits, of the dedication and well-orchestrated activity of the Koch brothers, other anonymous donors, and multiple (c)(4) groups behind the 63-seat U.S. House member shift in 2010, and what they are doing this year to shift the balance of power in the U.S. Senate in 2014.

Concludes Johnson, "If Harry Reid thinks he’s fed up with the Kochs now, he may just be getting the first taste of what their political network has in store."

Sen Ted Cruz: Stand for Principle

Senator Ted Cruz ends his latest video clip with a phrase that should make conservatives smile:

Should OCare Lies and Deceptions Render it Null and Void?

One man thinks so, and he wrote a scathing letter this month to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts telling him so:

The point I am making is simple. Obama ADVERTISED and SOLD his Obamacare to the American People under DECEPTION and LIES and this was the President of the United States that did the initial lying. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health & Human Services, also perpetrated Obama's LIES.

Based on the forgoing, this should make Obamacare NULL & VOID! The best analogy that I can think of is, let's say you go to your car dealer to purchase the car of your dreams and you agree to buy the car for the price you agreed on. The dealer orders the car and when it arrives at the dealership, the salesman says, "Oh, by the way, I lied, the cost is really double the cost that we promised." You would NOT be OBLIGATED to purchase that car, for the simple reason that the sales person used BOTH LIES and DECEPTION to get your business and the contract would be NULL & VOID!!

In Screw You, Mickey Kaus, Ann Coulter writes of her experience to purchase health insurance under the new Obamacare scheme:

With zero help from the Obamacare website, I eventually figured out that there was one lone insurance plan that would cover treatment at a reputable hospital. The downside is, no doctors take it.

So my only two health insurance options -- and yours, too, as soon as the waivers expire, America! -- are: (1) a plan that no doctors take; or (2) a plan that no hospitals take. You either pay for all your doctor visits and tests yourself, or you pay for your cancer treatment yourself. And you pay through the nose in either case.

That's not insurance! It's a huge transfer of wealth from people who work for a living to those who don't, accomplished by forcing the workers to buy insurance that's not insurance. Obamacare has made actual health insurance "illegal."

It's not "insurance" when what I want to insure against isn't covered, but paying for other people's health care needs -- defined broadly -- is mandatory.

It's as if you wanted to buy a car, so you paid for a Toyota -- but then all you got was a 10-speed bike, with the rest of your purchase price going to buy cars, bikes and helmets for other people.

Or, more precisely, it would be like having the option of car insurance that covers either collisions or liability, but not both. Your car insurance premium would be gargantuan, because most of it would go to buy insurance, gas and air fresheners for other people in the plan.

If you have employer-provided health care, you may not have to make the 400 phone calls I had to, but the result will be the same: You're not getting what is commonly known as "insurance." You're getting a massive bill to pay for other people's chiropractors, marriage counselors, birth control pills, smoking cessation programs, "preventive care" appointments and pre-existing conditions.

Health insurance has been outlawed, replaced with a welfare program that has been renamed "insurance."

IBD: OCare Exposes Lies About Uninsured

From Investor's Business Daily:

The truth is that Democrats had been misleading the country about the uninsured for decades, mischaracterizing who they were, exaggerating their plight, and grossly inflating their numbers.

ObamaCare is now exposing this fraud for all to see.

Of the 46 million who supposedly lacked insurance, for example, more than 40% were either eligible for Medicaid, enrolled in Medicaid, or weren't U.S. citizens. ObamaCare helps none of these groups.

Of the rest, they are predominantly young and in good health. Most of their intervals spent without insurance are relatively short and a significant portion have incomes over $50,000, which means they aren't eligible for ObamaCare subsidies.

Meanwhile, just 5% said they were refused insurance because of poor health or age, according to a Kaiser survey. Most cited cost as the barrier.

But while ObamaCare claims to solve the first problem through its guaranteed issue requirement, it largely fails to fix the cost problem. Even with subsidies, ObamaCare's inflated premiums are still unaffordable for many uninsured.

In fact, the McKinsey survey found that more than half of the uninsured who shopped for an ObamaCare plan cited cost as the reason for not buying one.

There are better, more targeted, and far less expensive ways than ObamaCare to help those who truly need it. ... But getting these done means first being honest with the public about just who the uninsured really are.

Rules for a Happy Life

You're young and you want to live life to the fullest. How do you do that to ensure the greatest happiness? Charles Murray offers this advice:

When it comes to a life filled with deep and lasting satisfactions, most of the clichés are true. How could I make them sound fresh to a new generation? Here's how I tried. 

1. Consider Marrying Young—You've got to wait until the right person comes along. I'm just pointing out that you shouldn't exclude the possibility. If you wait until your 30s, your marriage is likely to be a merger. If you get married in your 20s, it is likely to be a startup. ...
   
   Lots of things can be said in favor of merger marriages. The bride and groom may be more mature, less likely to outgrow each other or to feel impelled, 10 years into the marriage, to make up for their lost youth. ...
   
   What are the advantages of a startup marriage? For one thing, you will both have memories of your life together when it was all still up in the air. ... Even more important, you and your spouse will have made your way together. Whatever happens, you will have shared the experience. And each of you will know that you wouldn't have become the person you are without the other.


2. Learn How to Recognize Your Soul Mate—Marry someone with similar tastes and preferences. Which tastes and preferences? The ones that will affect life almost every day. It is OK if you like the ballet and your spouse doesn't. Reasonable people can accommodate each other on such differences. But if you dislike each other's friends, or don't get each other's senses of humor or—especially—if you have different ethical impulses, break it off and find someone else.
   
   What you see is what you're going to get. If something about your prospective spouse bothers you but you think that you can change your beloved after you're married, you're wrong. Be prepared to live with whatever bothers you—or forget it. Your spouse will undoubtedly change during a long marriage but not in ways you can predict or control.

Car Ads: Greed vs. Hard Work

Below are two car ads, one that infuriates conservatives and another that infuriates liberals.

Conservatives don't care for this ad, which has a teenager jacking up her babysitting fee after assessing the parents' Chevy Tahoe.

Chevy Babysitter (http://youtu.be/yrguaMKfF_c )


Liberals are generally outraged by this Cadillac ELR ad, which has actor Neal McDonough selling American hard work, success, and wealth while poking fun at others around the world who prefer 'taking a month off'. 

The First Ever 2014 Cadillac EL: Poolside (http://youtu.be/qGJSI48gkFc)

Moore: Biggest Corporate Welfare Queens

"If Republicans are going to get truly serious about cutting government spending, they are going to have to snip the umbilical cord from the Treasury to corporate America," writes Stephen Moore. "You can't reform welfare programs for the poor until you've gotten Daddy Warbucks off the dole. Voters will insist on that — as well they should."

Moore cites a report by watchdog group Open the Books, which monitors federal grants, loans, direct payments and insurance subsidies paid out by the federal government to individuals and corporations.

From 2000 to 2012, Fortune 100 companies received $1.2 Trillion in payments from the federal government, notes Moore; and that "number does not include the hundreds of billions of dollars in housing, bank and auto company bailouts in 2008 and 2009... [nor] the asset purchases of the Federal Reserve or indirect subsidies like the ethanol mandate that enrich large agribusinesses such as Archer Daniels Midland" (ADM).

So who are the biggest corporate welfare queens?

Federal Contract Spending (the largest of which is military contracts): Lockheed Martin ($392 billion); General Dynamics ($170 billion); and United Technologies ($73 billion).  Moore argues that taxpayers at least get services in exchange for these tax dollars.

Biggest Grant Recipients (mostly for President Obama's 'green technologies'):  General Electric ($380 million); General Motors ($370 million), Boeing ($264 million), Archer Daniels Midland ($174 million), and United Technologies ($160 million).

Taxpayer-Subsidized Loans totaling $8.5 billion: Exxon Mobil, Ford Motor, and Chevron.

Federal Insurance Bonds (not including TARP money): Wells Fargo ($3 billion); JPMorgan Chase ($3 billion); Citigroup ($1.5 billion); and Bank of America ($1.5 billion).

Concludes Moore:

The pipeline of federal dollars into the coffers of corporate America runs so full now that many top university MBA schools offer courses in how to lobby for government grants, contracts and other giveaways.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., are two of the few heroes willing to take on the corporate titans feeding off the taxpayers. The cowardice of the rest of the party leaders may explain why congressional Republicans are so unpopular with voters these days.

Rep Trey Gowdy's ENFORCE the Laws Act

"Rep. Trey Gowdy [R-S.C.] took to the House floor Wednesday to defend his proposed Enforce the Laws Act [H.R. 4138], which would empower Congress to take the executive branch to federal court for unilaterally changing or refusing to enforce federal laws," reports Justin Green @ Washington Examiner.

Below is a short YouTube video of his remarks. As Gowdy explains, Congress has the power of the purse and the power of impeachment, but those are punishments, not remedies, and they often hurt innocent people in the process. Gowdy's bill seeks to give Congress standing in federal court when the executive branch fails to enforce laws.

His bill passed the House by a 233 to 181 vote, with five Democrats joining the majority.

Cell Phone Cost vs Obamacare Premium

President Obama claimed this week in a Funny or Die "Between Two Ferns" video that young people can get Obamacare coverage "for what it costs you to pay your cell phone bill."

But Giuseppe Macri @ Daily Caller found that Obamacare coverage was at least twice as costly as cell phone service:

For comparison’s sake, we’ll define an average middle-of-the-road plan as consisting of a smartphone, two-year upgrade, unlimited calls, unlimited texts and an average of two gigs of downloadable Internet data per month.

Discounting taxes nationwide, that plan costs about $90 on Verizon, $80 on AT&T, $70 on Sprint, and $60 on T-Mobile every month. Both Sprint and T-Mobile offer the same plans with unlimited monthly data for $80. All pricing is relevant as of January 2014.

Of the Affordable Care Act’s “bronze,” “silver” and “gold” coverage plans offered on the Washington, D.C. health insurance exchange marketplace, the cheapest middle-of-the-road equivalent silver plan is $181.01 per month, after subsidies, for the lowest age bracket, which covers 27-year-olds and under that make about $25,000 annually. Silver plans must cover 70 percent of all medical costs, according to the law.

For the same age group in Pennsylvania, which is one of the 10 cheapest states in which to purchase health insurance on the federal exchange run in 36 states, a silver plan with the same coverage still costs $145 per month. A similar plan under Covered California, the largest state-run exchange with the highest number of enrollees, costs an average of $175. California had the highest number of uninsured Americans nationwide prior to the implementation of the law last October.

Altogether, that makes the average monthly cost of health care for young people under the Affordable Care Act a little more than twice as expensive as the average cellphone bill.

An Idea to Shrink the Tax Code and IRS

An idea from a political veteran via a blog post by Clark Judge:

In the course of one month, Bengazi, the IRS scandal, and the tapping of the Associated Press all broke — and the GOP couldn't do a thing with it.

The GOP should come out for a flat tax and announce that, thanks to all the administrative savings from so vastly simplifying the tax code, we'll lay off half the IRS. Get rid of all those agents they hired for Obamacare and many more. Americans hate the IRS. The complexity of the tax code is a big reason for the agency's corruption. And you get a tax code that is friendly to economic growth to boot. Tie the two issues — stagnation and corruption — together.

Commenters to Judge's post note that many conservatives have long thought the flat tax idea a good one. Given the recent exposure of IRS corruption, however, the idea may never have been as appropriate as it is today.

Malkin: ObamaCare for All Illegals

"ObamaCare promoters relented to GOP pressure to include an illegal-alien ban on eligibility and vowed endlessly that no benefits would go to the 'undocumented'," writes Michelle Malkin. "But denial is the Obama way."

In Oregon last week, officials revealed that nearly 4,000 illegal immigrants have been “accidentally” steered from the state's low-income Medicaid program and enrolled in [federal] ObamaCare in violation of the law.

Because Oregon's health insurance exchange website has been offline and its software architects under investigation for possible fraud, the Oregon ObamaCare drones have been processing each and every application manually. That means nearly 4,000 illegal-alien applications with “inaccurate” data somehow passed through government hands and somehow ended up getting routed through.

What a slap in the face to millions of law-abiding Americans, who have lost their health care coverage and work hours thanks to Democrat-sponsored federal health care regulatory burdens and mandate costs...

Read the rest of the story here.

If Libs Had Had Their Way, Women Couldn't Vote Today

March is Women's History Month, so it's a good time to highlight an excellent article on how vehemently the Left fought against giving women the right to vote in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

David Catron's two-page article, Republicans and Women's Rights: A Brief Reality Check, was written in April 2012 in response to the Left's modern 'GOP War on Women' myth. In the process, though, he provides a timeless history lesson all women should know about who really was — and who really was not — on their side during a forty-year legislative war between conservatives and liberal-progressives to secure women's right to vote.

That war began in 1878, when a California Republican named A.A. Sargent introduced the 19th Amendment only to see it voted down by a Democrat-controlled Congress. It finally ended four decades later, when the Republicans won landslide victories in the House and the Senate, giving them the power to pass the amendment despite continued opposition from most elected Democrats -- including President Woodrow Wilson, to whom the suffragettes frequently referred as "Kaiser Wilson."  ...

...the Republicans continued to introduce the 19th Amendment in Congress every year, but the Democrats were able to keep it bottled up in various committees for another decade before allowing either chamber to vote on it. In 1887 it finally reached the floor of the Senate. Once again, however, it was defeated by a vote of 34 to 16. After this setback, advocates of women's suffrage opted to put pressure on Congress by convincing various state legislatures to pass bills giving women the vote. This met with some success. By the turn of the century a variety of Republican-controlled states, including Wyoming, Colorado, and Idaho, had granted women suffrage. During the first ten years of the new century, several other states gave women the vote, including Washington and California.

Congress, however, didn't deign to vote on the issue again until 1914, when it was once again defeated by Senate Democrats. It was subsequently brought up for a vote in January of 1915 in the House, where it went down by a vote of 204 to 174. Nonetheless, the Republicans continued to push even after it was defeated yet again in early 1918. The big break for 19th Amendment came when President Wilson, a true Democrat, violated his most solemn campaign promise. Having pledged to keep the United States out of the European conflict that had been raging since 1914, he decided to enter the war anyway. This set the stage for the 1918 midterm elections in which voter outrage swept the Republicans into power in both the House and the Senate. This finally placed the GOP in a position to pass the amendment despite Democrat opposition.

The 19th Amendment was "passed by Congress in 1919 and ratified by the states in 1920," thanks to conservatives who simply refused to stop fighting for women.

Rand Paul is CPAC Straw Poll Winner

Senator Rand "Paul took 31 percent of the nearly 2,500 votes cast" in the Washington Times/CPAC straw poll taken during the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend (Senator Ted Cruz came in second with 11 percent). Paul won last year's poll as well, and Roger Simon @ pjmedia thinks he knows why:

He [Paul] seems future oriented, unlike the rest of the potential candidates who mouth platitudes, liberal and conservative, bashing each other in the most tedious manner imaginable. Yes, the liberal side is by far more repellent, and old fashioned in ideology to the point of ridiculousness, but this does not absolve the right of the need to come up with forward-thinking solutions to the obvious American decline.

That is why Paul appeals to the young who are oriented, as they should be, toward the future.  The whole Democratic Party is oriented toward the past and so are, alas, too many of the Republicans.  ...

Paul is doing the right thing in seeking to expand the Republican base — appealing directly to minorities and students to explain how conservative/libertarian policies are better for them, instead of running and hiding from these liberal constituencies as Republicans normally do.  That Paul is going into the very bowels of the beast in the next few days, UC Berkeley,  to give  a speech is commendable and dramatic.  I wouldn’t be surprised if he had some interesting results.  The time is certainly ripe.  And beyond that, I think we all know that if we show people some respect they often — though certainly not always — return the favor.

Will: IRS's Behavior Taxes Credulity

George Will takes on the IRS, the Obama Administration, and Lois Lerner—the face of the IRS's abuse of conservative organizations:

What’s been said of confession — that it is good for one’s soul but bad for one’s reputation — can also be true of testifying to Congress, so Lois Lerner has chosen to stay silent. Hers, however, is an eloquent silence.

Lerner is, so far, the face of this use of government to punish political adversaries. She knows what her IRS unit did and how it intersects with the law, and for a second time she has exercised her constitutional right to remain silent rather than risk self-incrimination. The public has a right to make reasonable inferences from her behavior. ...

There almost certainly are people, above her and beyond the IRS, who initiated or approved the IRS’s punitive targeting of conservative groups and who hope Lerner’s history of aggressive partisanship will cause investigators to conclude that she is as high as responsibility for the targeting rises. Those people should hire criminal defense attorneys.

Bedard: ObamaCare Will Reduce Wages Says Union Report

"A national union that represents 300,000 low-wage hospitality workers charges in a new report that Obamacare will slam wages, cut hours, limit access to health insurance and worsen the very 'income equality' President Obama says he is campaigning to fix," writes Paul Bedard.

Unite Here warned that due to Obamacare's much higher costs for health insurance than what union workers currently pay, the result will be a pay cut of up to $5 an hour. "If employers follow the incentives in the law, they will push families onto the exchanges to buy coverage. This will force low-wage service industry employees to spend $2.00, $3.00 or even $5.00 an hour of their pay to buy similar coverage," said the union in a new report.

Union head Donald "D." Taylor, in a note also being sent to Congress, demands changes and admits to being reluctant to bash a president his union supported.

"Believe me; I enter this entire debate about the consequences of the ACA with a deep reluctance,” he wrote. “Unite Here was the first union to endorse then-Senator Obama. We support the addition of health care to millions of Americans. Yet facts are facts, and Obamacare will cost our members the equivalent of a significant pay cut to keep their hard-won benefits.”

Taylor also suggested that Democrats in Washington are telling unions to stop griping about the impact of Obamacare on their members. He quoted a Senate aide saying, “Labor needs to regress to the mean.” Said Taylor: “In other words, roll back what you have and take one for the team. Ironic, given that Congress and the president carved out an exemption for staffers on the ACA. We cannot sit idly by as the politicians carve up our health plans while they carve out exceptions for themselves and every special interest feeding at the trough in Washington.”

Union's Report: The Irony of ObamaCare: Making Inequality Worse

Expect Bizarre Questions from Your Doctor

"Were you hit by a falling kayak? Injured while baking, vacuuming or spending too much time in a deep freeze? Encountered a lamppost for the second time? Were you bitten by a turkey? Never fear, the ICD-10 is here," writes Grace Marie Turner and Tyler Hartsfield.

Starting this October, your doctor will be required to record precisely whether you were bitten or struck by a parrot, macaw, chicken, turkey, or any "other psittacines," or encountered any one of 140,000 other specific medical conditions, injuries or diseases.

For 30 years, the U.S. has used the ninth revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9), but the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is requiring virtually all hospitals, laboratories and medical offices to convert to the more complex ICD-10 coding system on Oct. 1. ...

The ICD-9 has about 17,000 codes, while the new ICD-10 will have more than 140,000. These cumbersome new administrative responsibilities will take away from the time doctors can spend with their patients. ...

Legislation is before the House and the Senate to block the implementation of ICD-10 and give small and medium-size practices a much-needed reprieve from yet another bureaucratic nightmare.

No votes have been scheduled, but the clock is ticking for doctors.

Renewable Energy's Waning Significance

"After years of hoopla, wind and solar combined produce less than 1% of the world's energy," writes John Hinderaker @ powerlineblog.com.  As even investors lose interest, "it now appears that renewables may remain permanently insignificant."

Strassel: The Really Big Money in Politics

While the IRS goes after 501(c)(4)s for such "political activities" as voter registration drives, many wonder why the agency isn't turning its immense firepower on 501(c)(5)s — organized unions that spent $4.4 billion on politics between 2005 and 2011 alone and are the "biggest, baddest, 'darkest' spenders of all" on politics, reports Kimberley Strassel @ the WSJ.

When he recently took to the Senate floor to berate the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch for spending "unlimited money" to "rig the system" and "buy elections," the majority leader clearly meant to be condemning unions. ...

Unions, as 501(c)(5) organizations, are technically held to the same standards [as 501(c)(4)s] against coordination with political parties. Yet no Democrat or union official today even troubles to maintain that fiction. Hundreds upon hundreds of the delegates to the 2012 Democratic convention were union members. They were in the same room as party officials, plotting campaign strategies. The question therefore is how much of that $4.4 billion in union spending was at the disposal of the Democratic Party—potentially in violation of a bajillion campaign-finance rules? ...

As for Mr. Reid's complaint that some "rig the system to benefit themselves," that was undoubtedly a reference to the overt, transactional nature of union money. Nobody doubts the Kochs and many corporations support candidates who they hope will push for free-market principles. Though imagine the political outcry if David or Charles Koch openly conditioned dollars for a politician on policies to benefit Koch Industries?

In the past months alone, unions demanded an exemption to a tax under ObamaCare; the administration gave it. They demanded an end to plans to "fast track" trade deals; Mr. Reid killed it. They wanted more money for union job training; President Obama put it in his budget. Everybody understands—the press matter-of-fact reports it—that these policy giveaways are to ensure unions open their coffers to help Mr. Reid keep the Senate in November. The quid pro quo is even more explicit and self-serving at the state level, where public-sector unions elect politicians who promise to pay them more. If the CEO of Exxon tried this, the Justice Department would come knocking. The unions do it daily.

The unions have had a special interest in funding attacks on conservative groups, since it has led to the IRS's regulatory muzzling of 501(c)(4) speech. Under the new rule, conservative 501(c)(4)s are restricted in candidate support; unions can do what they want. Conservative groups are stymied in get-out-the-vote campaigns; unions can continue theirs. Conservative outfits must count up volunteer hours; not unions.

So now, in addition to a system in which organized labor spends "unlimited money" to "rig the system to benefit themselves" and "buy elections," (to quote Mr. Reid), Mr. Obama's IRS has made sure to shut up anyone who might compete with unions or complain about them.

Brooks: The Downside of Inciting Envy

"Fomenting bitterness over income differences may be powerful politics," writes Arthur Brooks, "but it injures our nation."

Envy has never really been part of the American psyche, argues Brooks, citing Alexis de Tocqueville—who long ago "marveled at Americans' ability to keep envy at bay, and see others' success as portends of good times for all"—and the Irish singer Bono:

“In the United States,” he explained, “you look at the guy that lives in the mansion on the hill, and you think, you know, one day, if I work really hard, I could live in that mansion. In Ireland, people look up at the guy in the mansion on the hill and go, one day, I’m going to get that bastard.”

"A national shift toward envy would be toxic for American culture," argues Brooks, and that shift seems to be occurring today.

The root cause of increasing envy is a belief that opportunity is in decline. ... People who believe that hard work brings success do not begrudge others their prosperity. But if the game looks rigged, envy and a desire for redistribution will follow.

This is the direction we’re heading. According to Pew, the percentage of Americans who feel that “most people who want to get ahead” can do so through hard work has dropped by 14 points since about 2000. As recently as 2007, Gallup found that 70 percent were satisfied with their opportunities to get ahead by working hard; only 29 percent were dissatisfied. Today, that gap has shrunk to 54 percent satisfied, and 45 percent dissatisfied. In just a few years, we have gone from seeing our economy as a real meritocracy to viewing it as something closer to a coin flip.

Brooks suggests two things to "break the back of envy and rebuild the optimism that made American the marvel of the world."

1. Build a radical opportunity agenda—"That means education reform that empowers parents through choice, and rewards teachers for innovation. It means regulatory and tax reform tailored to spark hiring and entrepreneurship at all levels, especially the bottom of the income scale. It means recalibrating the safety net to ensure that work always pays — such as an expansion of the earned-income tax credit — while never disdaining the so-called dead-end jobs that represent a crucial first step for many marginalized people."
2. Seek out aspirational leaders who never "vilify the rich or give up on the poor."—"Only a shared, joyful mission of freedom, opportunity and enterprise for all will cure us of envy and remind us who we truly are."

Humiliating Those You Hate

"...why would a gay couple want, say, a Christian opposed to gay marriage to photograph their wedding or prepare their cake?" asks Doug Banbow.  

It hardly seems the best way to ensure a satisfactory job. One suspects that it is an exercise in humiliation, an attempt to force those with unfashionable scruples to affirm what they reject. It is, in short, a calculated effort at intolerance.

Obamacare’s contraception mandate has a similar effect — and almost certainly received such vigorous support on the left for precisely this reason. Everyone, except in the narrowest religious circumstances, must provide/purchase health insurance that covers contraception (as well as sterilization and abortifacients). ...

But the point was always state-mandated intolerance rather than health care. The objective was to force Catholics, mostly, and the few fundamentalist Protestants who hold similar theological views, to pay for what they oppose. In fact, there is no better way to humiliate those you hate. It is pure and unadulterated intolerance, the ultimate Washington triumph: Make those you despise pay for what they despise.